So, it’s not a big deal that we’re starting our 2018 goals in mid-April, and are kind of considering the end of the year in August, right? I mean, after #BabyHam2018 arrives in August, it’ll be kind of crazy, and then next thing you know, it’ll be Thanksgiving and Christmas… essentially no time for major house projects.

So without further ado, here are our goals for things to finish this “year.” Please, hold us accountable hahaha.

Since the load bearing wall removal is finally complete and now we’re just working on the furnishing and room design, I figured I’d do a post summarizing all of the posts and work we’ve done over the past few months. Plus, I like being organized and having things in one place, much to the annoyance of my husband, but who still reaps the benefits of this trait anyway.

For the last few details of the wall removal posts, we just wanted to go through some of the finishing touches on the room. Starting with the electrical and recessed lighting:

The room is pretty large, and we knew it would be our main gathering area in the evenings after dinner. It’s so large though, that for it to be properly lighted, we would have had to have way too many lamps, and I knew that just one ceiling light on each side wasn’t going to cut it. We wanted some lighting that was soft (cue a dimmer!) but lit the area evenly and well, so we (I, haha) decided on recessed lighting. The rest is David’s department, so I’ll let him do the talking:

We didn’t realize how many decisions we had to make on the recessed lighting in the room. How many? What size? How far from each other? How far from the walls? How far from the beam? Should we treat the room as one huge room and space evenly, ignoring the beam? Or is it two separate rooms? It was a lot more difficult than we expected. There is so much conflicting advice online. One thing became pretty clear though, since the beam is not exactly in the center of the room, ignoring it to space the lights would have looked very strange. One row of lights would have been very close to the beam.

In trying to find the “style” of our home, I took a look around our neighborhood. It’s a pretty established neighborhood with hills, large(ish) lots, big trees, and a park. It fit all of our check boxes (with the exception of the one big grocery store in town that I hate) and it’s close to work, schools, and restaurants. The homes in our neighborhood were built between the 1960’s to the 1990’s, depending on the location. Ours is in the newer section and was built in 1993, and is considered a “large, expanded colonial.”

I thought maybe if I researched colonial homes, it may give me a bit more inspiration of what our style for this house was going to be. It doesn’t really make sense to have a house on the beach that’s decorated in mid-century modern style, or a cabin in the mountains that’s decorated with coastal decor, right?